The data foundation for digital transformation

Of note, is how it is able to take the enterprise data architecture model, refine it and bring it forward into HANA.

SAP’s head of product management for its analytics and development, Juergen Haupt said, “HANA doesn’t run in a vacuum. There are many data sources around HANA like Teradata, Oracle and so on…it has a very strong enterprise information management (EIM) strategy.”

In HANA 2, there is now a brand new element called the Enterprise Architecture Designer (EAD) with which organisations can now describe and represent the entire data architecture of the enterprise. With this feature, Haupt claimed that impact analysis of changing data elements and enterprise processes can now be done.

Of course, HANA 2 is a journey and provides a strong foundation to build digital transformation capabilities on top of it.

And key to this is HANA 2’s openness with other data sources. It is open when data is on the way into HANA, open when data is on the way back out to where it came from and open in the sense that it brings everything together.

Foundation for digital transformation

When it comes to digitising business processes, one of the key elements is bringing together data that comes from additional sources. For example, sensor data for predictive maintenance. Sensor data is unstructured data, as is all the other data from sources that HANA 2 can process like spatial data, graph, text and streaming data.

“This is one of the focuses, and will be for the next few releases so that you are able to analyse and work on all these combined data in real-time, so that processes can run end-to-end on this platform.

“And the application can leverage all these different pieces. That’s basically the direction we are going with this,” Haupt concluded.